Brian
03-19-2006, 03:34 PM
The Great Escape, a Real-Life Game (http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/9451/The+Great+Escape+a+RealLife+Game/)
"You're trapped in a high tech Spanish slammer, crawling through real tunnels, behind real bars. First-person gameplay breaks out of the box. I just fought my way up a wind tunnel, scrambled through a ventilation duct, clambered across 40 yards of rope netting, rolled under a fence, and burrowed through a mass of grapefruit-sized plastic spheres. Now I'm facing two doors. One leads to freedom. The other to a room with something nasty in it, possibly involving torture. I've got a full sweat going, my pulse is hammering, and the countdown on my wrist-mounted navigation unit tells me I'm running out of time. Minutes ago, a pictogram flashed up at me on a video monitor. Now I have to match it to one of a dozen symbols on a column between the two doors. Pick the correct one and I'm free. Mess up and I'm toast. I make my choice. Bzzzt. The door to my right swings open to reveal a large chair bristling with wires and leather straps.
Until this moment, I thought I had mastered La Fuga. This medieval-looking electric chair sits deep inside an old bank in Madrid. The building has been remodeled to house La Fuga, a real-life role-playing game. Think of La Fuga (The Escape) as a $20 million cross between Halo and laser tag. The goal is simple: Decipher visual riddles to navigate and escape Mazzina, a high tech prison. The company behind La Fuga is called Négone. It was founded by a sister-and-brother team, network engineer Silvia Garcia Alonso and former investment banker Jorge, who owned a piece of a dotcom that sold to Yahoo! for $400 million. They put their share of the money into live immersive gaming, starting Négone in 2002 and opening La Fuga last October. "There were lots of advances in in-home entertainment," Silvia says, "but in real-world entertainment, there was nothing happening." A standard first-person shooter was one option, but the duo wanted something more cinematic. "There are certain plots that work again and again," Silvia says. "Finding treasure, a robbery, a big escape. The idea I think we all have when we see these movies is that it would be great to be the main character."
I pay 15 euros, set up an account, and receive a navigational unit with a networked PDA and an RFID chip that I strap to my forearm. The chip tracks my progress through the prison. I have three lives - three incorrect test answers - before the system will spit me back into the lobby. A kiosk scans the RFID chip in my wrist unit, and I head down a set of stairs and through a dark passageway into a room lined with steel. From a 17-inch flat*screen, a severe-looking woman with slicked-back hair tells me I've been assigned for reprogramming. Everything's in Spanish. I'm accompanied by a translator, but I need no help getting the gist: Resistance is futile."
Read full story here (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.03/lafuga.html)
"You're trapped in a high tech Spanish slammer, crawling through real tunnels, behind real bars. First-person gameplay breaks out of the box. I just fought my way up a wind tunnel, scrambled through a ventilation duct, clambered across 40 yards of rope netting, rolled under a fence, and burrowed through a mass of grapefruit-sized plastic spheres. Now I'm facing two doors. One leads to freedom. The other to a room with something nasty in it, possibly involving torture. I've got a full sweat going, my pulse is hammering, and the countdown on my wrist-mounted navigation unit tells me I'm running out of time. Minutes ago, a pictogram flashed up at me on a video monitor. Now I have to match it to one of a dozen symbols on a column between the two doors. Pick the correct one and I'm free. Mess up and I'm toast. I make my choice. Bzzzt. The door to my right swings open to reveal a large chair bristling with wires and leather straps.
Until this moment, I thought I had mastered La Fuga. This medieval-looking electric chair sits deep inside an old bank in Madrid. The building has been remodeled to house La Fuga, a real-life role-playing game. Think of La Fuga (The Escape) as a $20 million cross between Halo and laser tag. The goal is simple: Decipher visual riddles to navigate and escape Mazzina, a high tech prison. The company behind La Fuga is called Négone. It was founded by a sister-and-brother team, network engineer Silvia Garcia Alonso and former investment banker Jorge, who owned a piece of a dotcom that sold to Yahoo! for $400 million. They put their share of the money into live immersive gaming, starting Négone in 2002 and opening La Fuga last October. "There were lots of advances in in-home entertainment," Silvia says, "but in real-world entertainment, there was nothing happening." A standard first-person shooter was one option, but the duo wanted something more cinematic. "There are certain plots that work again and again," Silvia says. "Finding treasure, a robbery, a big escape. The idea I think we all have when we see these movies is that it would be great to be the main character."
I pay 15 euros, set up an account, and receive a navigational unit with a networked PDA and an RFID chip that I strap to my forearm. The chip tracks my progress through the prison. I have three lives - three incorrect test answers - before the system will spit me back into the lobby. A kiosk scans the RFID chip in my wrist unit, and I head down a set of stairs and through a dark passageway into a room lined with steel. From a 17-inch flat*screen, a severe-looking woman with slicked-back hair tells me I've been assigned for reprogramming. Everything's in Spanish. I'm accompanied by a translator, but I need no help getting the gist: Resistance is futile."
Read full story here (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.03/lafuga.html)